[This
book review was published in the Winter 2016 issue of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, pp.
122-129.]

Book Review

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family
and Culture in Crisis

J.
D. Vance

HarperCollins, 2016

This very popular book has two dimensions.The first is a personal narrative, an
American boy’s story of growing up in what would derogatorily be spoken of as
“redneck” culture, and rising eventually to succeed, however insecurely.The second is as an important addition to a
growing literature that in this age of “identity politics” directs attention to
a distinct ethnic group – the Scots-Irish – that has been little noticed even
though it has played a major role in America’s past and present.In effect, Hillbilly Elegy announces “We are here.Our rough-and-tumble culture is suffering
decay after so many of us have migrated to a now hollowed-out industrial
North.But take notice; the Scots-Irish
are a vastly important constituent element in the American demographic.”

Although this affirmation of their
identity is assertive, the very need for such assertion highlights how much the
“center of gravity” has shifted in American life during the past
half-century.There was a time when
Theodore Roosevelt excoriated the very idea of there being “hyphenated
Americans.”The United States today is a
different place.After many years of
mass immigration, both legal and illegal, much of it from the Third World,
“multiculturalism” is no longer just an intellectual’s catch-phrase, but the
reality of a newly made-over population.Something undreamt of before – “WASPS’s”[1] feeling of need for a
self-conscious awareness of their own particularity – is emerging.

This emergence is nuanced in a way that is significant
in the context of “identity politics.” What we see from Hillbilly Elegy is that not all whites are the same.Instead of being a homogeneous fraction of
the American population, the white population is a mixture of some widely
differing cultures.The Scots-Irish,
say, are rather different people than the patricians of New England or of the
Tidewater South.And, as we will see,
not even all Americans of Scots-Irish descent are alike.The large number of prominent and successful
Americans among them attests to their dysfunction not being universal.

Vance was born in 1984 and grew up in an Ohio steel
town that once was prosperous but that “has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for
as long as I can remember.”Deep down,
though, he felt his spiritual roots, so to speak, were at his
great-grandmother’s house in an Appalachian “holler” in a small town in
Kentucky’s coal country.One of his
parents “struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life” (most recently
with heroin), and neither of his grandparents had finished high school.His father abandoned his mother, leaving
Vance to grow up with a series of transient father substitutes.A consequence of this, which came to haunt
him after he was grown and married to a lovely law school classmate, was that
he “never learned how a man should treat a woman.”

As Vance tells about all this, we see the stark
underbelly of a dysfunctional culture, but without the alienation that has so
long burned within most literary treatments of it.The narrative is not unlike the film A Coal Miner’s Daughter, where the
realities are mixed with genuine affection and empathy.Vance says the people he tells about are almost
all “deeply flawed,” but that “I love these people” just the same.“There are no villains in this story.There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies
struggling to find their way.”The
book’s popularity is only partly explained by its being a good read; its allure
comes from its revelation, without being syrupy, of the real-life humanity of
the boy and those around him.

Vance describes
himself as once having been “pudgy and long-haired.” He almost flunked out of his first year of
high school, steeped in marijuana and alcohol.He “harbored resentment toward the world,” and at age 12 made “an
outright rejection of the Christian faith” that was so basic to the hillbilly
Bible Belt.Much of his account, though,
is about how he rose out of that abyss.His
high intelligence first becomes apparent when he tells us he always loved to
read and to work math problems.His life
turned around when he went to live with his grandmother, was “rescued by a
handful of loving people,” and was propelled by a couple of inspiring teachers
and some well-motivated friends.He did
so well on the SAT exam that his poor high school record was overridden,
qualifying him for college.Shortly
after the 9/11 attacks, though, he decided to go into the Marine Corps on a
four-year enlistment.(Military service
has for centuries been an important part of Scots-Irish culture, reflecting their
centuries of desperate fighting first with the English and later after their
migration to the Ulster Plantation in Ireland.)

Oddly, in a book that has so much to say about the
author’s human context, Vance tells little about his Marine Corps
experience.Those years could themselves
have provided the grist for much sociological commentary.This reviewer (himself a former Marine) surmises
the young man’s upbringing, in which obscenities were flung around in loose
abandon among family members and fighting was a way of life, had conditioned
him to accept the abuse that others with a more delicate background would find
objectionable.The Marines didn’t pick
up on that side of him, though, preferring to use what they accurately
perceived as his literary ability; they sent him to Iraq, but as a “public
affairs Marine” and not as an infantryman

Vance came out of the Marines with “an incredible
sense of invincibility,” and enrolled at Ohio State University, for which the
GI Bill paid much of the cost. He was graduated summa cum laude with a double major in 2009. From there, Yale Law School gave him a
“financial aid package” that “exceeded my wildest dreams.”[2]One summer while in law school, he worked for
the chief counsel to a United States Senator.At the school, he became an editor on the Yale Law Journal, and fell deeply in love with a classmate, his
future wife, the origins of whose name “Usha” he doesn’t explain.The book’s dust jacket reports that he is now
“a principal at a leading Silicon Valley investment firm.”

One would think from all this that he had “made
it.”It seems like a modern Horatio
Alger story, pure and simple.What will
surprise readers, though, is how much class-conscious insecurity he has felt,
both at Yale Law and even now.[3]Stepping out of hillbilly culture, he has
felt like “a cultural immigrant,” even to the point of lying to his friends in
law school about his past.He analyzes
this in clinical terms as “inner conflict inspired by rapid upward
mobility.”The result is a gnawing
psychic disorder in which he feels trapped.“In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit… Even at
my best, I’m a delayed explosion.” We
mentioned earlier how he says he “never learned how a man should treat a
woman.”The biggest surprise comes near
the end of the book when he tells how difficult it has been to have “a happy
partner and a happy home.”Usha has had
to “learn how to manage me.”Although
this psychological distress seems oddly out of place after all we’ve been told about
his successes, it actually serves to underscore what he has told us about the
cultural milieu in which he was raised.

Hillbilly
Elegy is content to relate a personal
story and makes no effort to place the hillbilly culture in historical
context.The effect has been to whet
this reviewer’s appetite for knowing more.For that purpose, he found the perfect book: Jim Webb’s splendid history
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped
America (2004).Webb, of course, is
a man of great distinction: A highly decorated Marine officer wounded in
Vietnam, a graduate of Annapolis and the Georgetown University Law Center,
Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, at one time a United
States Senator from Virginia, and the writer of six bestselling novels.Although he is not a professional historian,
his book on the Scots-Irish is a classic of historical scholarship.The subject is of special interest to him: at
many points in his book he makes clear how strongly he feels his Scots-Irish
roots and his nostalgia for his ancestors buried in the Appalachian hollows.

Webb recounts the origins of the Celts in Europe and
then tells in detail about their centuries of conflict with the English along
the much-contested border between England and Scotland.The bitterness of this experience is
illustrated when Webb tells us that in 1296 England’s King Edward I “entered
Berwick with some 5,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry, and in one day killed an
estimated 17,000 people.”The effect of
this slaughter was to arouse in the Scots “an uncompromising nationalism.”William Wallace and Robert the Bruce became
the heroes of the Scottish resistance.Scotland’s independence was assured when the latter of these men “lured
the English into the most decisive battle in Scotland’s history,” the victory
over England’s King Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314.

In 1610, King James I of England set up the Protestant
Ulster Plantation in Ireland.A
migration of “large numbers of lowland Scots” to Ulster had already been
underway, and was followed by many thousands more.Their Protestantism was Calvinist (and that
eventually became the basis for evangelical Christianity in the United
States).Webb describes them as a
“hard-bitten, unbending, tightly knit” people, “desperately poor.”He speaks of “the Scots-Irish character”
formed out of their struggles and their harsh lives in the mountains of
Scotland.It was a character marked by
“the mistrust of central authority, the reliance on strong tribal rather than
national leaders, and the willingness to take the law into one’s own hands
rather than waiting for a solution to come down from above.”

After more than a hundred years in Ulster, another
great migration began.Between 1715 and
1775, “virtually an entire people” – estimated as between 200,000 and 400,000 –
crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies.They headed for “the mountainous areas from central Pennsylvania to the
Georgia border.”In effect, they were
continuing their heritage as they had so long known it.It meant carving out life on the frontier in
the Appalachian Mountains, where the land was contested by “Cherokee and
Shawnee war parties.”Webb says “this
remoteness accentuated the historic independence of the Scots-Irish
culture.”There was little education,
few governmental services, and a wild life of “heavy drinking… devilish music,
sensual pleasures, constant physical challenge, and an inbred defiance of
authority,” ironically alongside a “fearsome Presbyterian fundamentalism.”When we are told that New Englanders abhorred
them, all of this helps us understand why.As we see in Vance’s Hillbilly
Elegy, there are contrasting levels of civilization, of which Vance was
acutely aware as a child and still feels self-consciously today.

The Scots-Irish
warrior culture led to their making up as much as 40% of the American army
during the Revolutionary War (in which, not surprisingly, they again fought the
English).The unsuccessful attempts by the
British during that war to subdue the mountain people led to a military
disaster that upset the Southern Strategy by which the British had hoped to
create, as Webb says, a “’domino effect’ whereby the Southern colonies would be
rolled up,” demoralizing the American cause.

Webb deals at length with President Andrew Jackson (in
effect a populist hero of the Scots-Irish), the minimal role the mountain
people played in the slave system of the South, their fighting for the
Confederacy in the Civil War[4] not as a defense of
slavery but as resistance to what they saw as outside control, and the
economic/cultural devastation that beset the South (and Appalachia) during the
decades that followed the war.

Vance’s
Hillbilly Elegy confirms what Webb then tells us about the twentieth
century migration of large numbers of the Scots-Irish from Appalachia to the
states of the industrial North, where they have been impacted severely by the
loss of manufacturing jobs.Webb says
there was so much migration that the roads north became known as “Hillbilly
Highways.”As we know from John
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and the
renown of Highway 66, “hundreds of thousands of other migrants from the South
and Midwest poured into California.” In
fact, the Scots-Irish diaspora extended across the middle and western parts of
the United States.They became “the
dominant culture in the settlements of many parts of Texas, Arkansas, Kansas,
Iowa, and Missouri,” and after the Civil War “would count heavily in populating
the Rocky Mountains and the Far West.”In the course of it, they came to be seen simply as “Americans” and not
as a distinguishable “minority.”

Although it is true that there has been (and is) a
“hillbilly culture,” it is also true that a large number of prominent Americans
have been of Scots-Irish lineage.Here
are a few listed by Webb: Historic
figures such as Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson,
Stonewall Jackson, Sam Houston, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George S. Patton, Sgt.
Alvin York, Audie Murphy, and David Hackworth.Presidents such as Andrew
Jackson, Chester Arthur, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.Writers such as Mark Twain, Horace Greeley,
Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Mitchell, and Larry McMurtry.Thespians
such as Tallulah Bankhead, Ava Gardner, Andie MacDowell, Jimmy Stewart, John
Wayne, Robert Redford, and George C. Scott.Musical figures such as Elvis
Presley, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Alan Jackson, and Toby Keith.

It is with all this in mind that Webb takes great
umbrage at what he sees as the recent drive by elites in politics and academia
to “twist yesterday’s America into a fantasy.”He says “the greatest disservice on this count has been the attempt by
these revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate
Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the
Confederacy.”The argument against
display of the Confederate battle flag comes from the premise that showing such
display “is a veiled effort to glorify the cause of slavery.” He decries this
as a “blatant use of the ‘race card’.”

Jim
Webb’s Born Fighting brings in so
much historical context that it is an excellent complement to Vance’s personal
narrative in Hillbilly Elegy.We would encourage readers to consider them
together.

Dwight D.
Murphey

Endnotes

1.The acronym “WASP”
refers, of course, as most everyone knows, to “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”Interestingly, it is accepted as a neutral
descriptor in the United States at the present time, despite its being quite an
obvious, and arguably vicious, characterization.It is oddly out of place when similar ethnic
slurs are so taboo that anyone who uses one is considered beyond the moral
pale.The explanation lies in the double
standards so prevalent in contemporary
America.

2.This
generous financial aid bears out the truth of something a lot of parents don’t
realize: that for a bright student from lower-income families it is often less
expensive to attend an elite private university, because of the assistance
available through its endowment, than it is to go to a public university.

3.This class
consciousness has not made Vance a Marxist.He describes himself as a “modern conservative.”

4.It is
interesting to note that the Confederate battle flag (which is today under attack
by the American Left as a symbol of “hate”) was “drawn from the St. Andrew’s
Cross of Scotland.”

[1]The acronym
“WASP” refers, of course, as most everyone knows, to “White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant.”Interestingly, it is accepted
as a neutral descriptor in the United States at the present time, despite its
being quite an obvious, and arguably vicious, characterization.It is oddly out of place when similar ethnic
slurs are so taboo that anyone who uses one is considered beyond the moral
pale.The explanation lies in the double
standards so prevalent in contemporary America.

[2]This generous
financial aid bears out the truth of something a lot of parents don’t realize:
that for a bright student from a lower-income family it is often less expensive
to attend an elite private university, because of the assistance available
through its endowment, than it is to go to a public university.

[3]This class
consciousness has not made Vance a Marxist.He describes himself as a “modern conservative.”

[4]It is
interesting to note that the Confederate battle flag (which is today under
attack by the American Left as a symbol of “hate”) was “drawn from the St.
Andrew’s Cross of Scotland.”